Hypocrisy, Thy Name Is ASA

The vote by the 5,000-member American
Studies Association to support the academic boycott of Israel,
reportedly by a 2-1 margin, has evoked many responses, but none so far
has identified the irony at the core of the matter. To show that irony,
and the deeper problem it illustrates, you need to know that a couple
of weeks before the ASA vote, the ASA’s 20-member National Council,
which administers the ASA and is elected by the ASA membership,
pre-voted in favor of the Israel boycott—and did so unanimously.

Can you imagine twenty serious scholars in any discipline voting
unanimously on any controversial issue? I can’t, so I thought it
worthwhile to examine the composition of the ASA’s National Council and
to peruse its members’ academic profiles, as described on the webpages
of their home institutions. This simple exercise reveals a stunning lack
of diversity of intellectual interests and perspectives in a sector of
American society, the university, that explicitly places a very high
premium on “diversity.” The apparent obsession with gender, gay and race
studies (or of U.S. imperialism) among the members of ASA’s National
Council seems to come at the expense of scholarship on just about
everything else....

If this isn’t one of the most disingenuous statements uttered
recently, it is certainly one of most ironic (or perhaps hypocritical or
bizarre). Given that gender and gay studies is a special area of
interest for this group of academics, it is notable that the Council
chose to single out the only country in the region where homosexuals can
live freely and without inordinate fear, and can practice their
professions unfettered by boycotts of another sort. (For some details on
attitudes toward gays in the Middle East, take a look at the recent Pew
Research Center study, The Global Divide on Homosexuality.)